First kiss

I didn't have my first kiss until I was 14 years old. I mean, I had kisses for sure, like spin the bottle kisses and truth or dare kisses and a couple other kid things like that, but the first time I kissed someone without anyone watching, when it was real, I was a freshman in high school. In fact, my first kiss was at school, in the library (and, ha ha, now I know that somebody I went to high school with reads this blog, which makes this slightly more awkward--hi Suzanne!) when we were supposed to be in class.

The boy was older than me, but I can't remember if he was in my grade or the one above it. He was the one who initiated everything. We had been sent by our history teacher to do some research--and I don't remember exactly what we were supposed to be doing or what reason we had to be spending so long in the library. But we were sitting at a table in the reference section, reading something out of a volume of an encyclopedia, and then somehow we ended up sitting on the floor, leaning against a bookshelf, kissing.

In retrospect, I think he must have been a good kisser, because everything about it felt natural and right and easy. I remember wishing he would use his tongue, and thinking that if I opened my mouth maybe he would, so I did, and he did. At the time I assumed all kisses were like that, natural and in sync--though several boys would definitively prove that assumption wrong later in high school.

I don't remember getting nervous about being caught, or getting a thrill from the fact that the librarian was only a few feet away from us at her desk. I don't think the location really affected me at all. I just liked the kissing. And even though I was 14, and 14 is pretty old for a first kiss, and by 14, adolescent hormones are alive and surging, I was definitely still pretty naive about it, because when he took my hand and put it on his fly, I was shocked. I was sort of okay with it at first, but when he tried to drag me into the library bathroom so that he could put my hand inside his pants, the rose-colored lenses came flying off. I wrenched my hand away and told him we had to get back to class, RIGHT THEN.

Then I spent the rest of the year avoiding him and his obnoxious comments, and trying to ignore the few times when he inappropriately grabbed me when we were in crowded rooms. It definitely threw a wrench in my attempts to think of my first kiss as something positive, since it didn't exactly turn out in that sweet, innocent way that I would hope my kids' first kisses would be. But on the other hand, now that it's far away, I remember that the kissing itself was nice, and sweet, and innocent, at least until the part when he tried to drag me into the bathroom. It's a nice benefit of time, the ability to separate out things that were all twisted together in your mind, and realize that even if the overall experience left you with a sour aftertaste, parts of it were still wonderful, or at least very nice.

I don't have a picture of my first kiss, obviously, or of the boy it was with, but I do have a picture of me with another kind of kiss, taken at age 11 when I visited my aunt in Hawaii:


Okay, your turn--what was your first kiss like?